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When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

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Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Latency for interaction with AI? For something the user use browsers and electron apps. A ping goes around the whole world before your pressed key is visible on the screen.

Dafuck? No way lol Playing from eu on us servers is not playable >A ping goes around the whole world before your pressed key is visible on the screen.

Are they more playable if the server is in the nearest coast compared to the middle of the US? If you're in the US, for something like AI inference, then RTT within the continental US is probably reasonable. Similar is likely true through most of Europe.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#152
post #2

Are these AI-driven data centers actually getting built? I was reading about Kevin O’Leary’s initial proposal for his Utah data center and it’s just preposterous, it’s inconceivable anyone needs that much compute at any realistic demand level. The ask is so massively large that even the scaled down version is just absurd. We also have the Stargate UK data center that the Starmer government trumpeted before it was exp…

Kevin O’Leary is a grifter and he should be completely ignored. He literally got rich conning HP (though they were stupid for going ahead with it). That being said, there is a lot of actual buildouts happening right now. The question is how much of the planned future capacity will actually get developed.

I thought he got rich conning Mattel to buy The Learning Company in 1999? They paid $3.5B for it and gave it away a year later. Then there was a lawsuit with a $100M+ settlement.

Kevin O’Leary also published pictures of him shedding tears while buying an Audemars Piguet watch, which should be brought up and mocked every time he’s mentioned.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#153
post #145
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, you move into a new flat. In the living room, there's five sockets on the west side, but only one on the east side, and that's planned for a lamp already. Does it make more sense to a) put up your TV and gaming console on the east side, and have an electrician run another power line across the room (they can install five plugs there too so you can keep the lamp and even charge your phone, which is nice), or b) si…

I like your analogy so I will use it in my counter argument. I even have a personal example! In my last place, there were no ethernet ports, and there was no shot that my landlord would install any. Coaxial wasn’t correctly wired up either. So my two options were to either move my setup into the kitchen, or to run an Ethernet cord up into my room. I chose the second option to not monopolize the dining room table. It…

> It wasn’t pretty but my roommates were happier with some painters tape on the walls than my computer being in the kitchen.

I’d be willing to bet your roommates would have been even happier if you used wifi.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offshore wind power costs ~3 times more per MWh than on land. You can still do it if you're really low on space, but if you have tons of empty space anyway, it may very well be cheaper to simply build longer power lines.

Plus the current admin is extremely hostile towards wind power projects.

The current admin doesn't have a long enough shelf life to be making any long-term plans based on their proclivities.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#155
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that actually make any sense when there is also plenty of wind across the ocean, which is >1000 miles closer to the coastal cities where people live?

Tends to have a lot of unfortunate pushback from the well-connected people who like to live on coastlines.

A wind turbine which is ~30 miles from shore can't be seen from the coast because of the curvature of the earth. Do you actually think you'll get more opposition to a wind farm nobody can see from shore with a 30 mile undersea power cable that correspondingly doesn't require any use of eminent domain, than needing to seize a line of land 1500 miles long for a transmission line?

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every consumer of electricity had to have power lines installed to their building in order to get electricity. They all then pay in proportion to how much electricity they use. The electric bill of a data center is large . It already includes the cost of building and maintaining power lines and generating power and everything else, because they all do, since that's what electric bills pay for. In general the problem…

Isn’t the entire point of this power line project to “upgrade the infrastructure to meet the new demand”?

People are looking for any excuse to complain about data centers right now. Building transmission lines is bad because you're taking peoples land; not building transmission lines is bad because there isn't enough existing capacity. The first one is obviously preferable but when you're looking for an excuse it works out either way.

What the complainers (i.e. the media companies) actually want is for the AI companies to stop letting people use AI to answer questions they used to read media articles to answer.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I know a thing or two about rf, emf and electricity in general and I don’t see why or how these hv wires would cause cancer, or if they did why would it be specifically leukaemia. Probably the same theory for how a microwave cooks food. > I’ve also anecdotally noticed that people are concerned about many things where there is like very marginal evidence that maybe this is slightly bad for you but then regularly eng…

> Probably the same theory for how a microwave cooks food. At 60 hz? I think that’s a bit low for microwaving.

It is if you want your food cooked in under five minutes. The question is, what happens at a lower frequency but a longer period of time?

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The leukemia is bullshit, though. The numbers are too small to make any kind of definitive statement, or to properly compensate for things like socioeconomic factors - plenty of other potential causes on the rural farms and poor urban neighborhoods where we usually build power lines, after all. This seems like the thing where people use the phrase "there is no evidence of" to imply that something has been disproven…

> what it actually means is that we don't know enough to say one way or the other. To take another illustration: nobody can prove that there is not between the Earth and Mars a china teapot revolving in an elliptical orbit, but nobody thinks this sufficiently likely to be taken into account in practice. I think the leukemia claim just as likely.

If there was a teapot at a proposed orbit then there would be various falsifiable ways to prove it one way or the other. Once you do the experiment, you have the evidence. Before you do the experiment, you don't.

If there is a cancer risk then good evidence either way would require randomized controlled trials, which for long-term exposure are very expensive and take a long time, so then nobody does them and nobody really knows the answer. This is not the same thing as knowing it to be false.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#159
post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the voltage of power lines to datacenters?

Lots. They are trying to build Gigawatt transmission to these

Seems dangerous in case the line breaks or short-circuits.

Re: When can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?

#160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whats the relevance of fibre optic latency to electric lines?

Either the data center is in the wind belt and you run fiber to the people, or the data center is near the people and you run power to the source. Either way you have to do some kind of cable run, and that means land.

There was a massive dark fiber buildout in 2000. The hyperscalers already have long haul fiber optic infrastructure everywhere in US.
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